Richard Stallman, chair of the Free Software Foundation, said on Thursday that the Linux trademark fracas in Australia has distracted attention away from the real issue - that of freedom to distribute and change software.

The first Live-CD based on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has appeared. Its name is Ging (for Ging Is Not Ging) and it includes a GNOME 2.10 desktop, Abiword, and a complete toolchain with gcc 4.0.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is expected to be a coming out party of sorts for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas. Primary among the new features in and new direction for Orcas will be advances in how the toolset handles data, sources said. Data becomes "cool" in Orcas, said a source familiar with Microsoft's strategy for Orcas.

Recently the eccentric security researcher Michal Zalewski published his first book, entitled Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks. Because the book is everything except a security manual, ONLamp's Federico Biancuzzi chose to interview Michal and learn more about his curious approach to information security. Among other things, they discussed the need for randomness, how a hacker mind works, unconventional uses for search engines such as Google, and applying AI to security tools.

After a great deal of interest from the community, we have decided to officially open the "SkyOS Code Ransom". In a nutshell, the SkyOS Code Ransom is a system to encourage developers to port various software packages to SkyOS, as well as a way to reward them for their efforts. Depending on how successful and how much interest there is in the "SkyOS Code Ransom", we may expand this feature of the website a great deal more in the future.

"Version 1.2 is the third official release of the Gentoo-based VidaLinux OS (VLOS). The changes and enhancements to this edition are significant, but not good enough to save this conceptually astute operating system from failure. VidaLinux 1.2 is nice to play with, but don't expect a comfortable, complete desktop experience a la SUSE or Mandriva." Linux.com has the details. My Take: Tested VLOS the other day, and while it may be not be perfect yet, it's definitely on the way to being an attractive and usable system.

The X Window System (commonly referred to as X or X11) is a network-transparent graphical windowing system based on a client/server model. Primarily used on Unix and Unix-like systems such as Linux, versions of X are also available for many other operating systems. Although it was developed in 1984, X is not only still viable but also is in fact the standard environment for Unix windowing systems. This article thoroughly discusses X.

What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders, LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader), and review the pros and cons of each.

It would seem that the upcoming release of Microsoft's Windows Vista does not seem like a good thing for the desktop Linux community. After all, this update to Windows XP is going to focus on two attributes which have pushed users to Linux for years- security and stability. Upon closer inspection though, the move to Vista may be the perfect time for the Linux community to make headway on the desktop and increase its user base dramatically. The number of features which Microsoft has cast aside since Longhorn and the hardware requirements of Vista have set the stage for a large scale move to desktop Linux.

This question and answer article features WebSphere consultant Roland Barcia, who talks about developing J2EE and Web services applications on Rational Application Developer V6. You can download the Linux version of Rational Application Developer V6 here.

AROS Developer Adam Chodorowski is interviewed at The AROS Show. AROS community have also, been discussing browsers and work on numerous drivers has taken place in recent months.

I've just incremented the OSNews version number from 3.0 to 3.1. I'm not really sure if now is too early or too late to make this change, but some fairly large backend changes have occured recently that prompted me to revisit whether or not this is really the same site that 3.0 was at rollout. Anyway, there's a nice new feature that comes along with the change to 3.1 -- THREADING. Read on to find out about it.

For off Windows XP machines offer several options - including hibernate, stand by and shut down. However, many users don't know the difference. What's worse, however, is that applications and drivers can veto a user's decision to hibernate or similar. In Vista however, applications will be warned that a computer is entering sleep and have a second or two to save what ever they need to, but the programs won't get a say in whether the machine slumbers.

The third beta of SUSE 10.0 has been released. The most important highlight is the PPC version, which is now also available. Furthermore, a lot of bugs have been fixed too.